River Cottage Treatment Show 1

Date Published:

07/09/2007

First up, it’s a group of finger-lickin’ chicken-lovers who are living off takeaways and cheap chicken portions from the supermarket....

Hugh’s not afraid to use shock tactics in his mission to change their ways.

He exposes the gang to the full horrors of the factory poultry farms that produce the meat they love, in the hope they will embrace the free rage alternative.

And so he asks them to take care of the River Cottage poultry flock themselves – and bond with the birds that will, at the end of the week, become their dinner.

Hugh wants to get them cooking too, and battles to overcome their food phobias, squeamishness and sheer laziness, to show them just how well they can eat, using the very best local, seasonal and organic ingredients from the farm.

Freda

Freda lives in Archway with her 15 year old daughter and works in a beauty salon.

Everyday at work Freda and her colleagues sit around and decide what takeaway they will have for lunch.

These meals come from the local kebab shop where she’ll have a chicken kebab made from various scraps of chicken, or she’ll have a chicken and sweetcorn pizza, a McChicken sandwich from McDonalds, a zinger burger meal or a 3 piece battered chicken meal from KFC, or just a chicken burger from a nearby takeaway.

Chicken all the way then...

Lisa

Lisa is 26 years old, has a 2 year old daughter and lives in Essex.

Lisa’s got a real bee in her bonnet about organic food; she doesn’t understand why it’s so expensive, especially when they don’t use any pesticides on it. And also how a young mother on a budget is meant to eat that way as it's unaffordable for her. She is open minded about food though.

When she was 13 she once went beating with her uncle who used to shoot pigeons in the Essex countryside. All of her uncles are into game shooting, but she only experienced that way of life once when she was a teenager and not at all in the last 13 years.

Neville

Neville and his partner Sam have two kids, aged 6 and 4.

Neville freely admits to having a terrible diet; "Mr West-Indian, over-cooked, genetically modified chicken, extra salt, extra fat, extra bad, bad food!" He eats a lot of junk food, especially chicken from KFC, Chicken Cottage and where ever else he’s passing. If he buys chicken to cook at home he gets it from Dalston market where he gets the halal meat because it’s cheaper, or else the supermarket, where he buys “the crappy chicken, if I’m honest.”

He thinks the cheaper it is, the more its been pumped full of drugs/genetically modified/generally nasty. Why does he buy it? “Because it tastes good!”

Richard

Richard is a student from Manchester, and he’s a Chicken man! He eats chicken every single day. A normal meal for Richard is a Lidl chicken burger and oven chips. He admits he has a weird fetish for chicken; he eats popcorn chicken, chicken burgers, chicken wings. At the supermarket only chicken seems to jump out at him.

He’s a massive take away eater when he has the money for it; he’s even paid by cheque a few times. He really likes eating meat, but he thinks that fresh meat is too expensive. After watching a documentary about McDonalds he gave up chicken nuggets.

But only McDonalds ones.

Tony

Tony is the manager of a fast food outlet near Leeds. He’s worked for the company for 9 years on and off, and his busy life of working shifts over the week has meant that only up until about 3 months ago did he actually have a cooker in his house.

That’s how little cooking this man actually does. 90% of his food intake is the fast food he eats at work.

Tony loves chicken so much that he’ll have something with chicken in almost everyday. But he’s not really got any idea about where his favourite chicken meal comes from other than the fact that a factory makes it.